Part of the advice given me is to forget the past and embrace the future. I've only got the one mother. However the threat feels real and present. So I will divide it into three categories. Past, present and future.
The past sets things up. My mother was a daughter of an orphan whose father had suicided after divorcing his dying wife, leaving his children in foster care. Grandfather, as a young man, lost his eye and was pensioned off. He claimed he lost his eye at Gallipolli, but my other Grandfather said he never saw him there. My mother's father had four daughters and it is said he sexually molested them. Two suicided. My mother was a convicted atheist, while her mother was devoutly religious in Anglican(?) tradition (not a very wide division between faiths, imho). Mother married my dad on his 21st birthday. She was 22. He had been a lead person in a Presbyterian fellowship group until he married my mother and embraced atheism. I was raised as an atheist. A bitter divorce followed the death of one of my sisters, and my mother gained custody after pointing out my father beat me up a lot and got me to testify age 11. Not long after, I was supposed to meet with my father regularly, but he had beaten me up after the divorce and I'd asked to not see him. A compromise was found where I saw a mutual friend of theirs. That friend sexually molested me. My mother used that to negotiate access to a holiday home belonging to the molester. That should have been the end of it, but she invited the molester to my graduation from university. She later said she hoped to provoke a scene and embarrass my father. I said I could no longer talk to her. So she began getting family to ask me to reconcile. My grandmother met regularly with me. When my grandmother was dying, she apologised for what she had done. I forgave her. My mother used my grandmother's funeral to meet with me. My father told me he forgave my mother and I should .. he wasn't privy to what had happened, except to what my family had spun in a political sense. My father died over a decade later and I wasn't part of the funeral as I'd left that for my mother to attend.
The present. I became a Christian at age 18 and told my father but there was never further discussion. I graduated at age 23 because I'm a bit slow and had left home to avoid my mother. I'd been failing my first few years at university, but after leaving home and working for a living my marks improved. My mother kept track of me and got the molester to phone me on my birthdays at any of the places I was staying. After my grandmother passed, I had difficulty at work as a teacher, first stumbling over what might have been an ALP involved pedophile ring at Campbelltown. and later being a witness to a child that apparently died from school neglect. My mother called my school and said she was armed with guns in a message she left for me at the front office. Mother sent me letters saying she was improving and not drinking as much as she had. She wrote me she bought some dogs. Later she wrote that the dogs had died in a freak accident involving their collars getting tangled in house furniture. Then she got my older sister to explain that the dogs had both been put down by a vet having got cancer .. at the same time. More recently she has been contacting me under an assumed name of one of the pets she killed .. 'Buddy' .. claiming to be Christian inspired by testimony of Mary in various heretical texts with really screwy theology.
The future. I am in love and wish to have family. I have visions of my mother harming my wife and children. I hear her excuse being that it is because I wouldn't reconcile with her. And yet I feel the danger is from my trying.
Forgiveness is the path, and I am at peace having done that. But I cannot help her, and despite the urgency in which those who don't know, but are family, suggest reconciliation, I have prayed on the matter and do not feel that is what God wants for me to do. And I know I could be wrong.
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